Kanzenshuu

Discussion, generally of an in-universe nature, regarding any aspect of the franchise (including movies, spin-offs, etc.) such as: techniques, character relationships, internal back-history, its universe, and more.

I literally never see the Moon have the right angular size in any fictional media. It ALWAYS looks bigger in just about every fictional setting I can think of. Same with the Sun. Why is Akira Toriyama even being singled out here?

Name 1, no... name 10 fictional settings that depicts the Moon with the right angular size.

Because Akira Toriyama didn't just draw the moon as being bigger than what it actually is, he actually drew the moon as being located right next to the Earth as though it looked exactly like "not to scale" depictions of the sun & moon on diagrams of the solar system. Toei copied this same drawing and had it depicted in the anime.
The point here being that its not about AT or Toei being singled out but that there is enough evidence to support a theory that the Earth is at a different distance in DB like in other mediums of fiction. The theory can be "dumb as shit" to you all you want but it does have some merit to it.
I hate how some people think that Pure Boo is undisputedly the strongest Boo but I wouldn't call it "dumb as shit", just that I don't agree.

Once again, it's artistic license. There's a scene in the Jaco manga where Jaco's spaceship crashes into the moon and the moon only appears to be a few times bigger than the ship. That's obviously not meant to be the case.

Once again, it's artistic license. There's a scene in the Jaco manga where Jaco's spaceship crashes into the moon and the moon only appears to be a few times bigger than the ship. That's obviously not meant to be the case.

That's a gag scene, the depiction of Earth from Freeza's ship is serious on the other hand.

Once again, it's artistic license. There's a scene in the Jaco manga where Jaco's spaceship crashes into the moon and the moon only appears to be a few times bigger than the ship. That's obviously not meant to be the case.

That's a gag scene, the depiction of Earth from Freeza's ship is serious on the other hand.

No, it's really not. You're making mountains out of anthills for no reason.

Once again, it's artistic license. There's a scene in the Jaco manga where Jaco's spaceship crashes into the moon and the moon only appears to be a few times bigger than the ship. That's obviously not meant to be the case.

That's a gag scene, the depiction of Earth from Freeza's ship is serious on the other hand.

Goku taking Boss Rabbit and his gang to the moon is also a gag scene. Yet you don't seem to have a problem using it for your argument.

The funny thing about outer space is it's 3-dimensional. You can literally view the Earth-Moon system from any position.

The scan on the left is perfectly acceptable seeing as the Moon is just a spec. The Moon is very likely much further off into the distance than the Earth, with the path between the two bodies being near parallel to our perspective. The problem is you're assuming the path between the Moon and Earth is perpendicular to your perspective, when it probably isn't. Toei's illustration is also perfectly acceptable, although it can be an opposite case where the Moon is closer than the Earth, with again, the path between them being near parallel to the reader's perspective. Here's a picture I took myself in Universe Sandbox simulator to give you an idea what I mean for the manga scan. Universe Sandbox has all the celestial bodies and their distances to scale. I can take any picture I want from any perspective. I can zoom in in two dimensions, or three.

The Moon is further off into the distance than the Earth from my perspective (the distance being to scale to the Moon's actual distance). The path between the Moon and Earth is not perpendicular to my perspective, but rather, near parallel.

Hugo Boss wrote:Toriyama sitting in a chair deciding what is canon about Dragon Ball.

That's hilarious, I halfway laugh iinternally every time I meet someone with this headcanon

Toriyama probably doesn't know what the word "canon" means at this point.
Still, he's the creator and he can't really create fanfiction of his own work. Until he does. Like that one of Goku and Vegeta talking to the dead Freeza.

There's another dumb SERIES of theories I've encountered but they're less about Dragon Ball itself and more about Dragon Ball as a piece of media. To give you a hint of what it is, let's just say that it made me seriously appreciate Kunzait_83's wuxia thread so much more. I've thought of making a more truncated version myself, just because that thread is so huge that it's actively detrimental to the central point.

"Dragon Ball invented [X]."

Dragon Ball invented charged energy blasts (even if you discount wuxia, we've seen this in Western media for as long as Western oral tradition has been a thing, so I was flabbergasted when I saw people seriously claim this)

And so on. If it's not Dragon Ball, then it's Journey to the West, which apparently was a stand-alone Chinese novel unlike anything else ever written at the time or until Dragon Ball itself was created.

I want to believe people confused "invented" with "popularized in Western media" (since most of these things genuinely weren't well known in the West until Dragon Ball hit the mainstream), but unfortunately you can find many people who unironically believe there were absolutely no pieces of media before December 21st, 1984 that involved superhuman martial arts, cultivation, humans using ki/chi/qi to enhance themselves, auras of power, or surpassing the gods (in a non-occult fashion, of course). And what it didn't invent, Western superhero comics invented and it built off of (instead of, you know, much older traditions).

The cold fact is that Dragon Ball itself isn't original, and that's perfectly fine since it was always a parody.
That's another misconception: that Dragon Ball was only ever a parody of one thing— Journey to the West. And once it stopped being a parody of Journey to the West, it went in its own completely original direction. Rather than, you know, parodying so many other pieces of media.
The thing about parodies & satires, I've discovered, is that they have a nasty tendency of overshadowing the things they're parodying. Look no further than Don Quixote, a parody of medieval & renaissance-era chivalry novels (and the only one anyone knows of now); Pride & Prejudice, a satire of 18th century standards; the movie "Airplane!" which parodied the famous airplane-based disaster movies of the day (that we've now largely forgotten) or "Blazing Saddles" which parodied Westerns, of which we only remember a few really notable ones despite them absolutely dominating cinema and TV in the '50s and '60s.
Dragon Ball is much like that. It didn't actually do a lot of original things itself besides quirky character designs because it was always parodying these things. Hell, it started parodying itself at the end of its run, which is how we got over-the-top stuff like fusion and Super Saiyan 3.
And again: there's nothing wrong with that. We'll always know Dragon Ball first anyway.

There's another dumb SERIES of theories I've encountered but they're less about Dragon Ball itself and more about Dragon Ball as a piece of media. To give you a hint of what it is, let's just say that it made me seriously appreciate Kunzait_83's wuxia thread so much more. I've thought of making a more truncated version myself, just because that thread is so huge that it's actively detrimental to the central point.

"Dragon Ball invented [X]."

Dragon Ball invented charged energy blasts (even if you discount wuxia, we've seen this in Western media for as long as Western oral tradition has been a thing, so I was flabbergasted when I saw people seriously claim this)

And so on. If it's not Dragon Ball, then it's Journey to the West, which apparently was a stand-alone Chinese novel unlike anything else ever written at the time or until Dragon Ball itself was created.

I want to believe people confused "invented" with "popularized in Western media" (since most of these things genuinely weren't well known in the West until Dragon Ball hit the mainstream), but unfortunately you can find many people who unironically believe there were absolutely no pieces of media before December 21st, 1984 that involved superhuman martial arts, cultivation, humans using ki/chi/qi to enhance themselves, auras of power, or surpassing the gods (in a non-occult fashion, of course). And what it didn't invent, Western superhero comics invented and it built off of (instead of, you know, much older traditions).

The cold fact is that Dragon Ball itself isn't original, and that's perfectly fine since it was always a parody.
That's another misconception: that Dragon Ball was only ever a parody of one thing— Journey to the West. And once it stopped being a parody of Journey to the West, it went in its own completely original direction. Rather than, you know, parodying so many other pieces of media.
The thing about parodies & satires, I've discovered, is that they have a nasty tendency of overshadowing the things they're parodying. Look no further than Don Quixote, a parody of medieval & renaissance-era chivalry novels (and the only one anyone knows of now); Pride & Prejudice, a satire of 18th century standards; the movie "Airplane!" which parodied the famous airplane-based disaster movies of the day (that we've now largely forgotten) or "Blazing Saddles" which parodied Westerns, of which we only remember a few really notable ones despite them absolutely dominating cinema and TV in the '50s and '60s.
Dragon Ball is much like that. It didn't actually do a lot of original things itself besides quirky character designs because it was always parodying these things. Hell, it started parodying itself at the end of its run, which is how we got over-the-top stuff like fusion and Super Saiyan 3.
And again: there's nothing wrong with that. We'll always know Dragon Ball first anyway.

Even in anime/manga, Fist of the North Star did a lot of that stuff before Dragonball.

Even in anime/manga, Fist of the North Star did a lot of that stuff before Dragonball.

Dragon Ball hasn't done anything that other shonen predating it hasn't done before (though, I suppose Dragon Ball did change the whole "manly artwork" scene in favor of "cute/goofy artwork"). Most of the tropes the fanbase sees in Dragon Ball originated from Ashita no Joe, Otoko Ippiki Gaki Daisho, Kinnikuman and Ring no Kakero. The latter manga's (Ring ni Kakero) influence on action shonen is quite noteworthy -- the cool rival, the technique naming, the tournament arcs and rescue arcs and all that kind of stuff originates from Ring ni Kakero. Saint Seiya pretty much expanded/polished upon these tropes and it was a major influence on Yu Yu Hakusho, Bleach and the second half of Dragon Ball.

While Dragon Ball is certainly popular and definitely took the genre of "fighting manga" and made it what it is today, Toriyama didn't write the law on how it's looked upon nowadays. That achivement belongs to Ring ni Kakero, and by association, Masami Kurumada and no other mangaka can ever take that level of accomplishment away from him (in this day and age, Shueisha are calling Ring ni Kakero the, ''Hot-Blood Fighting Manga Bible", i.e. every single action manga that succeeds today owes something to Kurumada's boxing hit).